Alias of Jasmina Sevic, a researcher and author for Widewalls. She graduated from the Faculty of Political Science (Department for Journalism) in Belgrade in 2013.

ChristianBoltanski, born in 1944, is a French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker. Self-taught, he began painting in 1958 but first came to public attention in the late 1960s with short avant-garde films and with the publication of notebooks in which he came to terms with his childhood. The combination in these works of real and fictional evidence of his and other people’s existence remained central to his later art. As well as presenting assemblages of documentary photographs wrenched from their original context, in the 1970s he also experimented inventively with the production of objects made of clay and from unusual materials such as sugar and gauze dressings. These works, some of them entitled Attempt at Reconstitution of Objects that Belonged to Christian Boltanski between 1948 and 1954, again included flashbacks to segments of time and life that blurred memory with invention.

In the 1970s photography became Boltanski’s favoured medium for exploring forms of remembering and consciousness, reconstructed in pictorial terms. After 1976 he handled the medium as if it were painting, photographing slices of nature and carefully arranged still-lifes of banal everyday objects in order to convert them into grid compositions that reflected the collective aesthetic condition of contemporary civilization in a stereotyped way. In the early 1980s Boltanski ceased using ready-mades (objets trouvés) as a point of departure. Instead he produced “theatrical compositions” by fashioning small marionette-like figures from cardboard, scraps of materials, thread and cork, painted in colour and transposed photographically into large picture formats. These led to kinetic installations in which a strong light focused on figurative shapes helped create a mysterious environment of silhouettes in movement.

In 1986 Boltanski began making installations from a variety of materials and media, with light effects as integral components. Some of these consisted of tin boxes stacked in an altar-like construction with a framed portrait photograph on top, for example the Chases School. Such assemblages of objects again relate to the principle of reconstruction of the past. Such works, for which he used portrait photographs of Jewish schoolchildren taken in Vienna in 1931, serve as a forceful reminder of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. In the works that followed, such as Reserve, Boltanski filled whole rooms and corridors with items of worn clothing as a way of prompting an involuntary association with the clothing depots at concentration camps. As in his previous work, objects thus serve as mute testimony to human experience and suffering.

Boltanski’s work has been exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among other institutions. His work is currently held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Boltanski lives and works in the Malakoff neighborhood of Paris with his wife, Annette Messager, with whom he occasionally collaborates on projects.

Useful Resources On Christian Boltanski

Year

Exhibition Title

Gallery/Museum

Solo/Group

2015

One Million Years - System and Symptom

Museum für Gegenwartskunst - Emanuel Hoffmann-Stiftung, Basel

Group

2014

Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Young Man of Oxford: Christian Boltanski

Modern Art Oxford, Oxford

Solo

2014

Christian Boltanski - The Heartbeat Archive

Arsenals Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), Riga

Solo

2014

Heritage 2: Sammlungen sammeln

Kunstmuseum Thun, Thun

Group

2014

White on White – Color, Scene, and Space

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art,Hiroshima

Group

2014

Inside

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Group

2014

I’m Still Here

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Estocolmo

Group

2014

The Hidden Picture - Collecting Art at Ing

Cobra Museum, Amstelveen

Group

2014

Symétrie Exotique - les Abattoirs

FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse

Group

2014

International Art Exhibition of the 5th Orient

Orient'Art Express Festival, Oujda

Group

2014

Magiciens de la terre, retour sur une exposition légendaire

Centre Pompidou - Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris

Group

2014

Le Mur, La collection Antoine de Galbert

La Maison Rouge, Paris

Group

2014

(Mis)Understanding - Werke und Manifeste zur Fotografie

Museum Folkwang Essen, Essen

Group

2014

In the Meantime, the Narrative Artist

Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art MoCA, Chengdu, Sichuan

Group

2014

The Disappearance of the fireflies

Collection Lambert, Avignon

Group

2014

Crime in Art

Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (MOCAK), Cracovia

Group

2014

Do it Moscow

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscú

Group

2014

Full House - 15 Years of Inventory and Exhibitions at Aeroplastics Contemporary